The first semester I taught developmental English at Santa Fe Community College, in New Mexico, I was sure I knew what my students needed to learn, and how to write a personal essay was certainly not it. I clearly remember my job interview at the college, sitting across from the program director, enthusiastically nodding as she presented the sequence of assignments, all of which were some type of personal narrative: an obstacle overcome, an important person and place encountered, a belief changed.
In spite of my nods, I had other plans. Twenty-five years old, beginning the second semester of my master’s program in liberal arts at St. John’s College, I was convinced that all people could be saved — morally, intellectually, even spiritually — by taking courses in the humanities. The vision of using deep literary and philosophical thought to awaken my future students’ minds had driven me to Santa Fe from rural Maine to attend the graduate school that most resembled the way I wanted to teach.
I had spent my first semester in New Mexico immersed in Shakespeare, Homer, and Euripides; passing happy days penciling questions in my beloved books; and writing essays on The Canterbury Tales and King Lear. So as the director talked on, I made quick mental notes of how I could bend my future course’s curriculum away from storytelling and toward “real” analytical writing.
It has been five years since that interview, and it is I who have been converted, not my students.
Throughout my first year of teaching, though, I held tight to my initial vision, asking at department meetings whether we were doing a disservice to our students by not challenging them enough, not asking them to write “real” essays. I remember often feeling unheard or misunderstood by the other faculty members. At times I thought that they were secretly prejudiced against our predominantly Hispanic, working-class students.
“Why don’t they think our students can cut it?” I asked myself as the meetings wore on. “Why do they think our students can’t think?”
I knew that my students were as smart as anybody else, and I wanted them to be able to prove it by wrestling with the same big questions that I was struggling with every Monday and Thursday night in my own classes at St. John’s. But in the department meetings, after I raised my concerns, a discussion of the next essay assignment — a narrative, of course — would take center stage, more tea would be poured and more oat-quinoa bars passed around, and we would move on.
One reason I was not initially convinced that my colleagues were right was that nobody gave me a full rationale for the narrative approach. I got only bits and snippets about how narrative writing would help our students produce detailed essays in future courses. It was only after several years of frustration that I reached a more holistic understanding of my work as a developmental educator, an understanding I wish I had had on my first day in any college classroom, whether as teacher or student: Narrative writing helps create an acting, feeling, deep-thinking self.
In The Twilight of American Culture, one of my educational bibles during graduate school, Morris Berman describes a visit he made to an inner-city charter school: “Many of the students move in a kind of fog that is almost impossible to describe; you have to see it to understand what I am talking about. It would be easy to think that these kids are lazy, or dumb, but, for the most part, that is not what is going on. Rather, they have been robbed of their motivation, and therefore of their identity.”
Although Berman was describing high-school students, they were identical to many of the students I saw in the community college’s halls: people turned darkly inward, or too brightly and mechanically outward, or completely off. But even in my first few semesters of teaching, I sometimes witnessed transformations as students wrote essay after essay about themselves. Through their stories, each of them became a more solid self. As they drafted and revised and added details, they created worlds unlike anyone else’s, and the foggy trances that used to fill the classroom turned into energy, opinions, and experiences to share.
Every semester, without fail, grandmothers died in my students’ essays. But nobody’s grandmother died in the same way, with the same blue wallpaper behind her or with the same memory of sneaking early-spring chicks into the house when she was a child. In a world where everybody seems to watch the same television shows, wear the same brands of clothes, and listen to the same music, personal essays become a way for students to not only demonstrate their individuality, but to actually experience it.
I vividly recall an assignment given by my English teacher in 10th grade. We were to write a personal essay on our “philosophy of life.” It was an assignment that thrilled me to think about, but when the time came to write the paper, I found myself staring in terror at the blank computer screen, unable to type even one word. Though I was comfortable with analysis, comparison, and argument, having grown up with a mother who was an English professor, I cried for hours as I struggled to write that personal essay.
As I think about that experience now, I wonder why I was not required to write more personal essays in school. In fact, besides the practice college-application essay we all wrote in our senior year, that paper on my philosophy of life was the only essay I remember writing from the first-person perspective.
Even when I went off to a good college and wrote good academic essays, I was never able to put a sense of self into my own writing. Instead, I wrote as I was trained. I wrote whatever would work, used whatever analytical slant fit the assignment. It didn’t matter if a particular vision connected to me in any essential way. After many courses in philosophy, literature, art, and religion, I still had little idea of who I was and what I believed. Though I couldn’t see that when I started teaching, and though I still loved the humanities passionately, they hadn’t, it turned out, saved me as I assumed they would save my students.
As Berman points out, a thoughtful life requires a strong self to think: “Interest in a real intellectual life ... could not have arisen without the re-emergence of a self to be interested in these things, and that process seems to have had a kind of spiritual or psychological shift at its center.” That “re-emergence of a self,” I believe now, is the true task of all kinds of liberal-arts education — not only developmental English education, but any curriculum.
Each time a student writes “I,” he or she steps more firmly onto a stage where meaningful thought and action are possible. Each time a student describes a specific, detailed world, he or she takes possession of a single self. That claiming of self is the springboard necessary for real engagement with college-level thought, and it was as necessary for me, I now understand, as it is for my remedial students.
I got my M.A. in liberal arts three years ago. But an interesting thing happened during the two years when I was both studying and teaching part time at the community college. My graduate essays seemed to breathe in a way my college papers never had. Each seemed to be an extension of my own, singular self — even though they were academic and analytical, and never included the word “I.”
Until now, several years later, that transformation was a mystery to me. But today I believe that, through my students’ explorations of self in narrative writing, I, too, learned something. At last, the humanities are definitely helping me live a fuller life. But it is my discovery of self that has proved to be my biggest salvation.
Bethany J. Carson is an assistant professor of developmental studies at Santa Fe Community College.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 40, Page B5